Hysteria, Christopher Bollas,  Routledge, 2000

Christopher Bollas has written an exceptional new book. Hysteria is a masterful analysis of one of psychoanalysis's most elusive and complex characters. Firmly ensconced within the independent tradition, drawing upon his original integration of Freud, Winnicott, Klein, and Lacan, Bollas, in a style that is ever his own, and in a manner that is determined, even fierce, has worked through not only the hysteric's resistance towards self-knowledge but modern psychoanalysis's resistance, or, perhaps better, neglect, not only of sexuality, but also of the unconscious itself. It could be ventured that American psychoanalysis has abandoned the intricate analysis of unconscious communications as the formative force behind personality organization. Bollas's rare imagining of these unconscious interactions between the future hysteric and his or her mother, no less than that between the hysteric and his or her analyst, marks one of the strengths of this book and provides the reader with a special clinical treat. Hysteria, with its extensive clinical material, is in many ways dedicated to the clinician. Along the way, Bollas's work asks us to reconsider our notions of multiple personality disorder, our preoccupation with sexual abuse, and our tendency to mistakenly treat many patients who are hysterics as borderlines. Readers may very well conclude that Bollas has captured something essential about the nature of our times—how both our preoccupations with sexuality and our daydreams—our woeful tendencies towards idealizations of every kind—convey something about the hysterical elements in our culture. Perhaps the hysteric, so appealing, so innocent, but so amazing, is our culture's representative personality.

At its most basic level (yet at its most sophisticated), Hysteria is an examination of the hysteric's complex relationship to its primary object. Bollas begins his book by defining the nature of the primary object and